The original image of the zebra came from the archives of Pearson Scott Foresman, donated to the Wikimedia Foundation. I thought it would be interesting to use the fabric as part of the body, without any outer lines to the figure, though the shape's obvious from where the stripes start and stop. I used Turkish Rug stitch for the hair on the nape of the zebra's neck, and its tail is also made up of threads which hang loose.

I'd been experimenting with making embroideries which are freestanding (i.e. not sewn onto a large piece of background cloth) and are a bit more three dimensional. I think, technically, this is called "stumpwork." This is a lamb adapted from various heraldic images of the agnus dei and, particularly helpful with the textures, this photo. It's almost 7cm high and 7cm across.

I made quite a few mice this year, but I was particularly pleased with how I managed to contour such a tiny face, using layers of wadding on the surface before I began stitching (1-stranded cotton) "fur". The whiskers are stiff Gutterman linen thread.

The magpie is based on K. J. Charles' logo. I was experimenting with gold thread so I couched some rather badly, not least because it took me a while to work out how to do it continuously so that I didn’t have to cut the thread and bring it back up again. The bird is mostly 2-strand split stitch, but I used one-strand around the eye, and for the eye and beak, as they needed more precision. This was on organza, and I was experimenting with it, too. I also had a layer of wadding/batting under the bird and circle.

I saw a video by Sarah Homfray which suggested using woven picots for the petals of a sunflower (the fifth of the ideas, I think). I'd never tried this stitch before, so it seemed like an interesting challenge, particularly as I wanted to make the flower without a large fabric backing . This way, I could make two overlapping layers of woven picot petals. The flower is made in three layers. The smallest is the central circle of French knots.

I'd seen people make whipped/woven circles and I wondered if it would be possible to use the same technique on a different shape. You can judge for yourself how well it worked! The bodies of the bats are fleece, and the eyes are French knots of metallic thread.

As you can see from the difference in backgrounds for the fish in the first and second images, the fish was made entirely separately from the blue fabric and then sewn on later when it was time for me to add all the elements to my book. The fish is about 12cm long. I was trying out a number of new things with it. First of all I used appliqué over which I embroidered the scales of the body. The scales were done using couching, which is also fairly new to me.

This tiger is from Judith Kerr's The Tiger Who Came to Tea. He's trying to finish drinking all the water in the house, and the last of it's in this kettle (a metal button). I used tulle, various layers of padding and then embroidered on top (though the tail and topmost arm were mostly completed separately and then stitched on when they were ready). The face was embroidered with one-strand cotton thread, with the rest of the body in 2-strand.

I've seen quite a bit of science embroidery recently, particularly the project Edinburgh University ran to recreate drawings by "Spanish neuroscientist and pathologist Santiago Ramón y Cajal [...] famous for his beautiful, detailed, and accurate, illustrations of the histology of the central nervous system." This piece of embroidery I made is nowhere near as detailed or intricate, but it's still fairly accurate and I felt the French knots worked well to recreate the original.